Definition: Metainformation

Category: General concept

Metainformation, or metadata which may be used synonymously, is a general set of data, which is used to hold information about other data. The distinction between data and metadata is usually drawn by a separation of the concrete data of an object and data describing that object. For instance, the contents of a book represent the data of the object book, whereas data describing the book, such as author or publisher, are metainformation of that object. http://www.semic.eu/semic/view/snav/library/Glossary.xhtml